See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Nightley, the Japanese startup developing geo-analytics solutions, announced on Monday that they raised a total of 130 million yen (around $1.2 million US) from Nissay Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, and Legend Partners in a series A round. This follows their previous funding of an undisclosed sum from NetAge and Altovision (now known as Experian Japan) in a seed round back in May of 2011. Yutaka Ishikawa, previously of NetAge, founded Nightley in 2011. Initially, the company operated the Milcle app which facilitated communication between shop operators and customers, but then pivoted their business to data collection and analysis specializing in location information. In addition to Inbound Insight, a tool capable of analyzing the behaviors of visitors for inbound businesses launched in July of 2015, they have released a series of services including ABC Lunch, an app that connects users and regional restaurants using SNS big data; ZouZou, a tourism support app for visitors to Japan; and Pokémon GO Insight, which shows popular areas for Pokémon GO on a map. See also: Tokyo Office Tour: Nightley brings behavioral consumer data to geo-analytics Of these, in particular the B2B service Inbound Insight contributes to the…
Tokyo-based Nightley, the Japanese startup developing geo-analytics solutions, announced on Monday that they raised a total of 130 million yen (around $1.2 million US) from Nissay Capital, SMBC Venture Capital, and Legend Partners in a series A round. This follows their previous funding of an undisclosed sum from NetAge and Altovision (now known as Experian Japan) in a seed round back in May of 2011.
Yutaka Ishikawa, previously of NetAge, founded Nightley in 2011. Initially, the company operated the Milcle app which facilitated communication between shop operators and customers, but then pivoted their business to data collection and analysis specializing in location information. In addition to Inbound Insight, a tool capable of analyzing the behaviors of visitors for inbound businesses launched in July of 2015, they have released a series of services including ABC Lunch, an app that connects users and regional restaurants using SNS big data; ZouZou, a tourism support app for visitors to Japan; and Pokémon GO Insight, which shows popular areas for Pokémon GO on a map.
Of these, in particular the B2B service Inbound Insight contributes to the company’s sales. This service collects and analyzes data based on posts published on SNS such as Twitter and Weibo, and clients can then get a taste of user tendencies (facilities visited, types of movement, routes taken) based on nationality. The company offers a premium service with more than 4,000 clients including major advertising companies, convenience stores, rail companies, and marketing research companies.
It appears that after one and a half years since the launch, the company will expand the variation of services offered through Inbound Insight.
He explained:
Nightley CEO Yutaka Ishikawa
We started with an SNS (social network service-based) analysis plan. From there we have expanded the variations using stats other than SNS, for example, partnering with NTT DoCoMo to collect anonymous data from inbound tourists (users of roaming in), and negotiating with the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry to gather and analyze data on the trends of visitors to Japan.
We are putting out a plan with Val Laboratory [known as Ekisupaato, the expert on stations] that multiplies station data and location analysis data, as well as developing a plan with the Mitsubishi Research Institute, who are skilled in tourism analysis, that can predict the future of inbound visitors.
For a diagnostic plan of priorities, for example, if you input the address list of a chain of stores, you can see which store has a large number of Chinese tourists, so providers know whether introducing the Alipay terminal is a priority or not.
They have also advanced statistically visible content by tracing the trends based on the price of the accommodations chosen by users, making it possible to see where users with more money are choosing, as well as the routes backpackers are taking. Recently, there are also increasing numbers of automobile and rental car companies, etc., requesting analyses of their raw trend data from customers, including location information, in order to obtain context from the data.
Nightley plans to use the funds raised this time around to expand their app and location intelligence business. Specifically, they are looking to improve and increase the plans for Inbound Insight, targeting companies looking to promote visiting foreigners to Japan and companies providing solutions for inbound actions.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based geo-analytics startup Nightley recently launched a web-based Pokémon Go tracking tool called Pokémon Go Insight, which shows Pokémon Go hotspots and advents of rare monsters on the map. It allows users to oversee where / what kind of Pokémon characters are appearing by analyzing social media conversations by Pokémon Go players. In order to find where Pokémon characters are appearing, players were typically using tools like PokéVision and PokéWhere, however these service became unavailable after July 31st since Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, shut down access from the third-party tracking apps to Pokémon Go servers and its data resources. In contrast, Pokémon Go Insight will be less affected by Niantec’s policy change since it adopts user-generated content voluntarily posted by players which is completely immune from the Pokémon Go platform. Nightley has developed several marketing solutions leveraging unique location-based analytics technologies, such as Nightley GIS Mesh Data and Inbound Insight. In late July, almost a week after the launch of Pokémon Go in Japan, the company released a Pokémon Go tracking tool called Pokémon Go Popular Spot. By adding the function to present advents of rare monsters on the map and improve…
Tokyo-based geo-analytics startup Nightley recently launched a web-based Pokémon Go tracking tool called Pokémon Go Insight, which shows Pokémon Go hotspots and advents of rare monsters on the map. It allows users to oversee where / what kind of Pokémon characters are appearing by analyzing social media conversations by Pokémon Go players.
In order to find where Pokémon characters are appearing, players were typically using tools like PokéVision and PokéWhere, however these service became unavailable after July 31st since Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, shut down access from the third-party tracking apps to Pokémon Go servers and its data resources. In contrast, Pokémon Go Insight will be less affected by Niantec’s policy change since it adopts user-generated content voluntarily posted by players which is completely immune from the Pokémon Go platform.
Nightley has developed several marketing solutions leveraging unique location-based analytics technologies, such as Nightley GIS Mesh Data and Inbound Insight. In late July, almost a week after the launch of Pokémon Go in Japan, the company released a Pokémon Go tracking tool called Pokémon Go Popular Spot. By adding the function to present advents of rare monsters on the map and improve the whole look-and-feel of it, the app has been officially released as Pokémon Go Insight at this time.
According to the tool, Pokémon Go hotspots in Japan include Ougimachi Park in Osaka, Setagaya Park in Tokyo as well as Tsuruma Park in Nagoya as of this writing. Regarding the freshness of the stats, the company says that analytics are being conducted at all times but applied to the website once a week because positions of the monsters are drastically changed. The service is only available for Japan at this time but the team may expand abroad city by city if such a request is received.
See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based Nightley, a Japanese startup developing analytics technologies using geographical data, launched a service this month called Inbound Insight, which visualizes how visitors to Japan behave on the map by leveraging what they post on social media platforms. Inbound Insight is available via two service plans: Behavioral Data Visualization Plan and Analytics Data Purchase Plan. As a freemium service, the former plan provides users with a heatmap on the map, popular destination rankings, and behavioral data via charts. In addition, premium users paying a monthly subscription fee of 100,000 yen ($800) also offers a route map showing how visitors are traveling around Japan, estimated nationality deviation (only for visitors from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand), estimated gender deviation (only for visitors from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), visiting venue data, posted words on social media platform, and attached pictures. User subscriptions will be updated every three months. The latter plan offers analytics data in a CSV format during the dates a user designates, with attributes like data and time, latitude and longitude, prefecture, city or town, street or block name, venue name, user ID, assumed gender, estimated nationality, posted text, and URL…
Tokyo-based Nightley, a Japanese startup developing analytics technologies using geographical data, launched a service this month called Inbound Insight, which visualizes how visitors to Japan behave on the map by leveraging what they post on social media platforms.
Inbound Insight is available via two service plans: Behavioral Data Visualization Plan and Analytics Data Purchase Plan.
As a freemium service, the former plan provides users with a heatmap on the map, popular destination rankings, and behavioral data via charts. In addition, premium users paying a monthly subscription fee of 100,000 yen ($800) also offers a route map showing how visitors are traveling around Japan, estimated nationality deviation (only for visitors from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand), estimated gender deviation (only for visitors from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), visiting venue data, posted words on social media platform, and attached pictures. User subscriptions will be updated every three months.
The latter plan offers analytics data in a CSV format during the dates a user designates, with attributes like data and time, latitude and longitude, prefecture, city or town, street or block name, venue name, user ID, assumed gender, estimated nationality, posted text, and URL for attached pictures. Starting at 500,000 yen ($4,000), the fee for this plan varies depending on duration and geographical coverage on what a user wants to grab the statistics in.
A route map showing how visitors are traveling.This map shows visiting venue data, posted words on social media platform.Estimated gender deviation (only for visitors from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong).
Nightley has been developing analytics technologies leveraging social interactions in Japanese, but the company has developed additional technologies to detect user language on social media platforms, their nationality, and whether they are in Japan or overseas.
Inbound Insight gives users analytics based on interactions from Twitter, Sina Weibo and other social network platforms. Meanwhile, private posts and log data from other, closed apps are not made subject to use as source of the statistics.
Nightley will market the product to government offices, the tourism industry, hotels, shopping malls, and store associations in Japan because they intend to invite foreign visitors to their sites, aiming to acquire 100 corporate users for the visualization plan as well as 20 corporate users for the data purchase plan.
Tokyo-based Nightley develops location-based analytics technologies. The startup was launched back in 2011 by CEO Yutaka Ishikawa who previously worked with Japanese web service company NetAge [1]. Nightley recently developed social media analytics engine Trexa, and started providing social media analytics to GIS service providers as part of their service Nightley GIS Mesh Data. I recently visited the company’s office near Shibuya to hear more from Ishikawa about this initiative. As some of our readers may know, several Japanese system integration companies have partnered with Twitter as a data reseller, obtaining rights to collect data using the Twitter API. Similarly Japanese big data solution provider Hottolink also partnered with US company Gnip back in October to distributing Gnip’s analytics data in Japan [2]. NTT Docomo also recently started selling mobile spatial statistics based on the usage of its mobile subscribers. I asked Ishikawa how his company differentiate from these big players. He explained: Conventional players typically give you an accumulation of longitude and latitude values with tweets or posts. These values tell you where users are or were, but they don’t give you insights about which floor or what store in a shopping mall they are in, or what they…
Tokyo-based Nightley develops location-based analytics technologies. The startup was launched back in 2011 by CEO Yutaka Ishikawa who previously worked with Japanese web service company NetAge [1].
Nightley recently developed social media analytics engine Trexa, and started providing social media analytics to GIS service providers as part of their service Nightley GIS Mesh Data. I recently visited the company’s office near Shibuya to hear more from Ishikawa about this initiative.
As some of our readers may know, several Japanese system integration companies have partnered with Twitter as a data reseller, obtaining rights to collect data using the Twitter API. Similarly Japanese big data solution provider Hottolink also partnered with US company Gnip back in October to distributing Gnip’s analytics data in Japan [2]. NTT Docomo also recently started selling mobile spatial statistics based on the usage of its mobile subscribers.
Nightley GIS Mesh Data (visualized sample)
I asked Ishikawa how his company differentiate from these big players. He explained:
Conventional players typically give you an accumulation of longitude and latitude values with tweets or posts. These values tell you where users are or were, but they don’t give you insights about which floor or what store in a shopping mall they are in, or what they are doing.
Our solution gives you more visibility around such attributes of users, and I believe this is our advantage, helpful in creating more efficient marketing efforts or planning store roll-outs.
When Ishikawa launched the company a few years ago, he was selling location analytics data a direct sales basis. But he subsequently learned there are business opportunities only among a very niche segment of marketing people in Japan. So he changed their sales strategy to intensify partnering efforts with big GIS players or enterprise system integrators [3].
They already have clients in need of geographical data plentiful with various organic attributes. I thought partnering with them would be much easier. They also have geographical analytics solutions, but it’s not very organic. I realized the complementary potential of working with GIS companies.
He expects the solution to be used not only for O2O solutions but also by people and companies working on more accurate area targeting.
The company is looking for funding opportunities and more engineers to help develop further growth. If you are interested in being a part of the team, don’t hesitate to contact them via this page.
Nightley office
NetAge was originally launched back in 1999 by Japanese serial entrepreneur Kiyoshi Nishikawa. The company was subsequently rebranded to ngi group, and became United which is well-known for mobile app CocoPPa. Apart from the company, Nishikawa launched a new incubation company called NetAge again a couple of years ago.↩
Hottolink is a subsidiary of Internet marketing agency Opt (TSE:2389). The former recently unveiled it was approved to be listed on the TSE Mothers market, a stock market for emerging companies. The IPO is scheduled to take place on December 9th.↩
Nightley recently partnered with Japanese system integration company Fujitsu for co-developing the lattter’s location data cloud service Spatiowl, and area marketing solution provider Giken Shoji International.↩
Nightley 
Masaru Ikeda
